


my love is like to ice

by connorswhisk



Category: DC Extended Universe, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon Compliant, F/M, Sad, just a quick oneshot on them because they invented love and they deserve so much better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-16 18:29:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29829102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/connorswhisk/pseuds/connorswhisk
Summary: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire /How comes it then that this her cold so great /Is not dissolved through my so hot desire /But harder grows the more I her entreat?
Relationships: Nora Fries/Victor Fries
Kudos: 1





	my love is like to ice

**Author's Note:**

> title from the first line of sonnet 30 by edmund spenser

They told him that his wife would never recover. They told him that her body would weaken, her blood cells would deplete, her strength would go, and eventually, she’d pass. They told him he’d have to pay thousands in medical bills for treatment, treatment that would merely slow the process instead of stop it, and keep her in great pain until she died.

They told him that there was nothing he could do to help her.

They didn’t know who they were dealing with.

He doesn’t have enough - although he’s a doctor, and he’s got a steady career, it just _isn’t enough_ \- and even with the added money from her job, it’s hardly close. It’s absurd, he thinks, _absurd_ that the doctors in Gotham would turn away a dying woman simply because she cannot pay.

Not for the first time, he wishes he were back in Denmark - the hospitals _there_ wouldn’t ask for nearly enough. They could help her. They could _make her better._

But she was born here, and she wanted to stay here, and he could never deny her anything in the world, not even if he wished for nothing other than to do so.

_We’re very sorry, Mr. Fries,_ they tell him. _But you simply do not have enough for treatment. We can issue some prescriptions for medication, referrals to other specialists, and, if you’d like, recommendations for books on the subject -_

He takes them up on the pills and nothing else, knowing that fruitless research and even more doctors will grant them with nought but a greater debt. He delivers the bad news to her in the car, and she sobs silently all throughout the night, while he holds her close and smooths down her hair and promises her he’ll find a way.

But he hasn’t been able to find a way for so long, and an entire month of his wife’s precious little time passes before he happens upon an article at work, an article written on yet another Neanderthal found encased in ice, and he kicks himself furiously because the answer had been right in front of his face the whole long while, and he’d been too blind to see it.

_I can do it,_ he tells her, barely able to contain his ardor. _I think I know how to save you._

She smiles at him, but the smile becomes a long and hacking cough, and the cough becomes blood spatters stained across the starch white surface of a tissue.

He sets to work straight away.

— — —

One moment, she’s breathing heavily into her oxygen mask, staring at her husband across the room and pleading with him - not necessarily pleading _no,_ but not pleading _yes,_ either.

The next, there’s a low whining sound as the gun powers up - she throws up her hands, shields her face, squeezes her eyes shut - and then she is still, so very, very still.

She can’t move, and she can’t see, and she can barely think, but she is alive.

She is still alive.

And the pain is gone. She doesn’t ache everywhere, bone-deep and resonating and all-encompassing. Her feeling of weakness is no longer there, replaced by ones of sleep, and lethargy, and _cold._ There is no ever-present tickle in her throat, no sudden urge to cough up blood; though she couldn’t cough if she tried.

She’s in limbo. Stasis. Almost like a coma.

She can’t see or hear her husband, but she knows, because she is still alive and because no one has woken her from her slumber yet, that he is still working. Throwing away everything, his entire career and reputation and life and _sanity_ for - for her.

A very selfish part of her urges him to keep going.

She’d found him one day, in his workshop, testing out his plan - but not on mice, like he’d told her. Mice don’t have names and jobs and Social Security cards, they don’t have husbands and wives and children and friends - they aren’t humans, and humans aren’t mice.

She’d made herself believe that it came as a shock to her, but she thinks, horrifically, that she might have known all along. That she’d deduced what her husband was doing, knew what kind of subjects he was using for his tests, and done nothing, done nothing to dissuade him or to change his mind.

These people deserved to live. They deserved to _live,_ but - but -

…But, damn it, so does _she._ She never had a say in what happened to her, what it did to her body and her soul and her life. She could never even afford to fix herself, and no one had seemed to care that that’s the way things had to be.

_He’d_ cared, though, and he _does_ care, and - and he’s not a bad man for doing it, and she loves him, she _loves_ him, and he’s doing this because _he_ loves _her,_ and the people he was using weren’t big or important upstanding citizens or anything, they were dealers, and thieves, and swindlers, and maybe, maybe because of all of that they _deserve_ -

No, she can’t think like that. Oh God, she _can’t_ think like that.

Nora -

_Victor -_

She silently waits inside her frozen cocoon, and prays to someone, anyone, that they might be able to save her husband before he saves her.

**Author's Note:**

> why won't dc let these 2 be happy...yeah mr. freeze kills people n shit but he's doing it for nora...i think we can make an exception
> 
> follow me on [tumblr](https://connorswhisk.tumblr.com), where i talk about dc and am ready and willing to take writing requests


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